Eulogistic comedy as domestic soft power: Biopolitical self-fashioning in It's My Day Off (1959)

Abstract

ABSTRACT Soft power as a concept measures the ability of a nation in obtaining positive outcomes overseas through cultural means, but its core ideas of attraction and credibility are productive in analyzing eulogistic comedy's contradictory functions of propagating official policy and refashioning self-interests in socialist China. It's My Day Off (1959) satisfies official expectations of constructing positive models for viewers to emulate, but it also reveals the technology of self-fashioning as a process under surveillance by the Party and the patriarch. A series of comic situations of missed opportunities foreground the logic of instant public recognitions and deferred libidinal gratification that overdetermines socialist self-fashioning as an endless psychic-somatic mechanism of self-othering. Surprisingly, it is by demonstrating the attraction of altruism that the film may have gained its unintended critical edge in disclosing the panoptic biopolitical condition in a socialist utopia.